The music of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The classic cult TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer just celebrated its 20th anniversary and to commemorate that I am going to highlight some of the iconic musical performances at the most popular nightclub in Sunnydale, The Bronze.

Cibo Matto (Season 2, “When She Was Bad”)

This performance is from the season two premiere in which they perform two songs, “Sugar Water” and “Spoon” and, this performance includes the iconic scene in which Buffy dances up on Xander to make Angel jealous. That scene would, of course, go on to be apart of the opening montage for the next couple of seasons. Prior to the performance Willow also gives the band a shout out mentioning how she was excited to see them, which is unique since the performers’ names are usually not mentioned. As a side note, the music video for “Sugar Water” is also worth checking out for its inventiveness.

The Breeders (Season 7, “Him”)

Kim Deal of The Breeders was a big fan of the show and as a result the band would often cover the theme song on tour and eventually got to play on the show itself in this season 7 episode. The Breeders are also one of the few fairly big acts to play on the show, which makes this performance in particular stand out. There aren’t any videos online of their performance on the show, but here is their official cover of the Buffy theme song.

Aimee Mann (Season 7, “Sleeper”)

Aimee Mann was another one of the bigger names to perform at The Bronze and is actually the only musical performer on the show to ever have a line, which was, “Man, I hate playing vampire towns.” In the episode she performed the songs, “This is How it Goes” and “Pavlov’s Bell”. There is also no video online of the performance but there is a promo of the episode in which Mann is mentioned.

Giles (Season 4, “Where the Wild Things Are”)

This final performance I’m going to highlight is not actually at The Bronze, but still counts among the most iconic musical performances that were on the show. In this episode Giles performs The Who song, “Behind Blue Eyes” at the coffee house in the downtown area of Sunnydale. This was the first of two performance by Giles on the show, later on in the series he played the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Free Bird’ in the episode “The Yoko Factor”. In addition, Anthony Stewart Head, the actor who played Giles released an album of his own in 2002 called, Music for Elevators. Here is the performance of “Behind Blue Eyes”.